The following is an edited version of the resolution on the struggle of youth passed by the last National Conference of the International Marxist Group.
It contains the main political and theoretical ideas of IMG's youth cadres in the work of building the newly-formed revolutionary youth organisation, the Spartacus League.
The decisive battles for a mass revolutionary party in Britain can only take place within the organised workers movement. However, the unevenness of development of the class struggle has led to a situation now where the qualitative transformation of the strength of vanguard organisation in relation to Social-Democracy and Stalinism lies outside or on the periphery of the organised working class.
The transformation of the vanguard which is at present on the agenda is not the breaking of large sectors of the workers movement from the Labour Party and the C.P., but is the breaking of significant social movements on the periphery of the working-class movement from the grip of the bourgeoisie and the working-class bureaucracies, and, in providing leadership for these movements, creating a political pole of attraction for the most conscious elements within the mass organisations of the class.
Such peripheral social movements are Black and Irish workers, the women workers, young workers (particularly apprentices) and secondary school students, above all else the students in higher education. The reason for making the construction of a revolutionary youth organisation the central axis in the coming period is because this is the most effective way to modify the relationship of forces between the revolutionary vanguard as a whole and the class enemies of the proletariat. Conversely, a youth organisation must act fundamentally as a political organisation, attempting to operate along Leninist lines with a definite political practice principally in the student milieu, and in the framework of a revolutionary Marxist programme. The youth work will construct depots, base camps, training centres and conveyor belts, a whole supporting network for the strategic battles ahead inside the trade unions and bureaucratic parties.
Sectors of Intervention—The University Student Front
The universities remain the weakest link in the chain of bourgeois power: this is due to the following broad factors:
(a) the crisis of bourgeois ideology, though it affects youth as a whole, is experienced most acutely by students who are called upon to glorify and perpetuate the intellectual and moral heritage of the ruling class. The technical function of the university places it in a more exposed position in relation to the global crisis of capitalism than any other institution in society.
(b) the era of neo-capitalism has thrown the universities into a profound institutional crisis produced by their necessity to respond to contradictory demands from the ruling class.
(c) the universities lack adequate structures of integration and regimentation. The notions of personal and financial independence, of "academic freedom" and of "character-forming" cultural pursuits, hang-overs of a previous era, provide room for political mobilisation and education, while attempts to introduce "reforms" which integrate the students more effectively into the structures of capitalism (such reforms are being voted now by the DES) threaten to produce a powerful response from the students without resolving the institutional crisis. The transitional character of the milieu further opens possibilities for political action.
(d) thus the crisis of bourgeois ideology and the institutional crisis of the universities—both in the last analysis reflections of the fundamental contradiction between the productive forces and capitalist relations of production—have produced powerful student movements exploding the traditional rules of the game, using direct actions, violence, etc. and expressing revolutionary aspirations.
Whereas in past periods the student milieu reflected ideologically the class struggle in general (the colonial revolution, the fight against fascism, etc.) and thus the role of revolutionaries on the campus was to make propaganda and agitation related to these general questions, in the period of neo-capitalism the appearance of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism within the universities means that the student population can be mobilised around demands specific to the university and educational system.
But the very fact that fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system have entered the universities and thrown up a student movement means that the solution of the contradictions within the universities lies beyond the power of the student movement. If the students focus simply on the immediate phenomena of the crisis within their college, they will inevitably fall prey to reformism. But if they put forward demands which fundamentally challenge the bourgeois education system, they find themselves without the means to fight for those demands. This can lead them to ultra-leftism—despairing of winning victories through mass struggles on the campus, they confine themselves to abstract revolutionary propaganda. Thus the student movement is caught between its revolutionary vocation and the objective limits of the university community.
A programme for students must therefore, if it is to mobilise masses of students, be related to issues specific to the university, but at the same time must transcend the campus in its goals if it is to avoid the reformist trap. Secondly the programme must not be simply a series of demands for changes on a campus but must be a programme of struggle.
The following are foci for such a programme:
— opposing all ideological manipulation of the students.
— opposing all regimentation of student life.
— political freedom on the campus.
— breaking all connections between the university and imperialist interests; support for anti-imperialist struggles.
— break the ties of the university with monopoly capital; support for workers' struggles.
— fighting all technocratic reforms; put forward demands that link the different sectors of the education system. Free higher education for all.
— no decline in living standards of students.
The effective struggle around this programme presupposes the existence of an organised vanguard within the universities pursuing this theme of struggle through concrete slogans and campaigns as a subordinate part of its overall strategy.
While the need for such a vanguard presses itself on the student movement, the required commitment, discipline, perseverance, are far from inherent in the unstable, unremembering university population. Hence the tendency towards student left coffee-bar circles producing all kinds of sophisticated ideologies which are simply escape-routes from the fundamental task of building a revolutionary organisation. Hence also the need for the vanguard youth organisation to be not simply a university student organisation but one which incorporates students from other sectors of the educational system and proletarian youth. The organisation must therefore fuse university students with a highly developed abstract consciousness but a lower level of commitment and students from other sectors of education and young workers who will tend to have a high level of commitment but a less highly developed conceptual apparatus.
The forms which the vanguard youth organisation will give to the student movement will not be the trade union of the classical type but the political mass movement which will include different tendencies, which is structured in united front action committees at the base and which has as its field of privileged, but not exclusive, intervention, the student milieu.
The building of this political mass movement within the universities, autonomous of the bourgeoisie and working class bureaucracies—which we might term the Red Base or Red University—is the strategic task of militants within the university milieu.
—The Lower Half of the Binary System
Whereas in some advanced capitalist countries the contradictions within higher education express themselves within a single institution—the university—in Britain their field of operation extends through a series of institutions divided within the binary system. The state is attempting to insulate the universities from the pressure of numbers, declining teaching resources, poor facilities, cultural sterility, etc., by concentrating most of the expansion in the non-university sectors of higher education. Students in the Polytechnics, Colleges of Education, will tend therefore to be much more acutely oppressed in a material sense. At the same time, however, the students in these sectors, largely proletarian in origin, maintain a far stronger contact with their social class origin and are more directly tied to specific occupational features, and therefore the corporatism, anti-intellectualism and conservatism which is the reality of the working class under social-democratic hegemony.
All this means that the objective basis for revolt exists within the lower half of the binary system, and that in the event of such a revolt this sector presents a much more direct conveyor belt of revolutionary consciousness into the working class milieu, both through origin and destination, but at the same time the integration of the student population means that it is slower to move and is less sensitive to our politics than is the case of the university student milieu. The issues on which it will be mobilised are much less those reflecting the class struggle in general—to which they are not highly sensitive—than questions relating to their future role in the productive process and their education in relation to that.
Thus teachers training colleges students can be mobilised around questions affecting the teaching profession, day-release students around the exploitation of apprentices, both these and Poly students around the material deprivation they face. They cannot be mobilised and reached unless the specificity of the situation is grasped.
At the same time, the student movement within the universities, because of the very importance and predominance of these institutions within the Binary system, will have an impact within this sector both directly and through the NUS which, in an effort to head off revolt within the universities by moving itself to the "left", precipitates an ideological re-evaluation within the colleges. Such an impact is clearly already being felt, as witnesses by the first struggles within the Colleges of Education and Poly's and by the spontaneous emergence of socialist societies in these institutions over the last six months.
—The Secondary School Front
The extremely repressive and authoritarian nature of the milieu, in conjunction with the school revolt against bourgeois culture and morality makes the secondary school sector an extremely explosive one. The size of the secondary school student population means that mass movements within this sector can have a profound impact on other social layers.
But at the same time the absence of basic democratic rights of students and the arbitrary power of teachers over their futures, coupled with the dependence of school students on their parents, places school militants in extremely vulnerable positions (cf. SAU victimisations).
The struggle in the schools must be built around campaigns against regimentation and for democratic rights as well as around general political questions, especially those brought up by teachers.
The forms of organisation should again be Action Committees (which may go under the name of SAU etc.) independent of "schools' councils" etc., which combine all tendencies in actions on specific issues: the aim should be to involve the mass of students in actions against the school authorities.
But given the repressive nature of the institutions, the militants in many places are forced to operate semi-secretly: using discotheques or film clubs and debating societies as propaganda instruments. External political help is therefore of decisive importance: leaflets produced and distributed by an external body to the school students can then be explained by the militants within the school. Thus in practice the schools movement in its still embryonic stage has relied upon the university student vanguard for help of this kind.
Attitude to SAU
The rapid spread of SAU branches round the country has testified to the ripeness of the schools for political struggle. At the same time SAU has shown ultra-leftism on organisational questions and a sloppiness over tactics which has led to the victimisation of many of its militants. It has tended to substitute revolutionary phrase-mongering for mass political action. Revolutionaries must win SAU members for the construction of a programme of transitional demands within the schools.
—The Workers Front
A youth organisation would not in the immediate future be doing systematic work in the working class organisations, but for two reasons it must possess a clear understanding of the perspectives needed for such work: first because it will constantly have to take into account developments inside the workers movement; secondly because it will be involved in solidarity actions with workers' struggles and must grasp the general framework of such actions. The youth organisation must be educated in the technical aspects of the workers movement and in the programmatic acquisitions of the revolutionary movement. In the present document it is worth pointing out only a few points:
(a) In this period the worker-student relationship has undergone a number of important changes:
(i) On the side of the students, the student movement has changed the dimensions of the workers-intellectuals problem: the role that was previously played by a few revolutionary intellectuals can now be played by a whole movement of young intellectuals. Thus the emergence of the student movements tends to make revolutionary ideas more accessible to workers, both directly through contact with revolutionary students and indirectly through the outpouring of cheap literature on revolutionary socialism catering for the student market.
(ii) The opening of a front of struggle in the student milieu to some extent modifies the relationship of forces between the workers vanguard and the class enemy, while the exemplary actions of the student movement can in certain situations (a rise in working-class militancy) revive explosive forms of struggle long suppressed in the working-class movement by the bureaucratic leadership.
(iii) The mobility of the student movement offers the possibility of direct intervention in workers' struggles on occasions. On occasions the student movement has actually influenced the line of workers' struggles.
On the working class side, new layers of the population must objectively be defined as working class, and the workers are now increasingly passing through institutions of higher education. While the precise forms of this cross-fertilisation are complex, the fact that it can take place is beyond doubt.
(b) As well as stressing the modifications in the worker-student relationship, we must constantly reiterate certain basic lessons about the workers movement which tend to be forgotten:
(i) The strategic problem is not simply to recruit as many workers as possible to the organisation, but to train the working class vanguard. This vanguard is the leadership trained over years of struggle in the factory and trusted by the workers. It is the section of the working class most active in the mass organisations.
(ii) To win a substantial section of this vanguard away from the bureaucratic leadership will require struggle within the mass organisations, based upon the struggle within the factory.
(iii) The working class vanguard will not break from its present leadership unless it is presented with a real organisational alternative.
The Youth Vanguard in Britain
Internationally, the youth vanguard has found organisational expression in splits from the youth organisations of social democracy and Stalinism in organisations more or less spontaneously thrown up by the mass movement itself, in various splinter groups that represented the old vanguard, or in combinations of these three.
In Britain the leftward evolution of NALSO occurred in a vacuum, divorced from any organic development in relation to a political base in the student milieu. When its funds were cut off by Transport House, the organisation collapsed without any response from the student population. The YCL, being a youth club formation in a period when young people were turning away from Youth Clubs to politics, has suffered a catastrophic decline over the last three years. Nationally, it has never been more than marginal to the youth radicalisation, although in certain localities it acquired an ephemeral presence in the schools movements. The politics of the C.P. have exercised no attraction for students, although its trade union base has enticed some workerist militants—a striking example being the Cambridge I.S. branch.
The two youth organisations with the greatest potential for becoming the vanguard formations within the youth were the Keep Left Y.S. and the RSSF. The Y.S., armed with the writings of Trotsky, with the educative experience of a fight with the Labour bureaucracy, and with a substantial base among youth, had the opportunity in 1964 to win hegemony within the various sections of young people. But its failure to win any hold within the crucial student milieu, linked with its sectarian mould, has reduced it to youth club activities with little influence over the politicised elements.
The RSSF represents a polar opposite to the KLYS and was born of the vacuum created by its failure and that of NALSO and the YCL. The strength of RSSF lay in its extreme implantation within the student left; its crucial tasks were to transcend the limitations of its milieu by raising itself to an overall strategic perspective within which the student struggle could be situated and by developing a firm organisational framework able to withstand the fickleness and instability of its milieu. Instead of this, however, RSSF became the passive reflection of those weaknesses its task had been to transcend: organisational chaos and a refusal to confront the strategic problems of revolutionary politics. Far from being able to organise and lead a national student movement and develop into a homogeneous political formation, it succumbed to ideological confusion and political fragmentation, united only in its rejection of revolutionary organisation, which, far from expressing its future, poses the threat of its own negation.
The degeneration of RSSF was not caused by any "inner sectarian logic", but by the lack of a cadre capable of providing political leadership to the organisation. When it was founded in 1968, the IMG had just begun to recruit its first handful of student comrades and was in no position to service the organisation. The great opportunity of using RSSF as a vehicle for the creation of a united student movement was presented to the I.S. group. But since the I.S. group itself lacked programmatic coherence or organisational solidity, it could scarcely provide RSSF with them. Consequently, by the second conference (Nov. 1968), RSSF, weakened by five months of inactivity in a period of great opportunities (especially the October Vietnam demo.), fell into the hands of the NLR comrades. They were able to provide a central office and information service and take some political initiatives, especially in relation to the LSE lock-out. But their programmatic vagueness, coupled with and reinforced by the absence of an organisational dimension in their work, meant they were unable to transcend the limits of a purely student organisation. An additional factor leading to the progressive decay of RSSF was the withdrawal from the arena of the large I.S. student contingent. Neither the Maoists nor the RSL were able to present a serious challenge within the student movement, the latter because it was busy in the Labour Party, the former because of, among other things, their obscure fratricidal disputes.
The Need for a Vanguard Youth Organisation
A revolutionary organisation within the student milieu cannot avoid fundamental questions of revolutionary programme. These problems are posed not only in relation to solidarity actions within anti-colonial struggles and anti-capitalist struggles within the working class, but also crucially in relation to the student movement itself. Such debates could be avoided within RSSF only by bureaucratically manipulating the organisation to muffle tendencies within it which had global political positions.
The notion that a loose federation of discussion/action circles linked to a national office could give coherent political leadership to the student movement has proved to be quite illusory. What is required is a real political organisation of revolutionaries, with definite rights and responsibilities of membership within a democratic centralist structure, built from the top (national conference) down.
This new organisation should have the following main features:
1. A global programme: permanent revolution in the colonial world; political revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; the revolutionary road to socialism in the imperialist countries; for building a revolutionary international.
2. A democratic centralist structure.
3. The main milieu of intervention to be the education system, but active role in solidarity actions with working-class and anti-imperialist struggles.
4. Membership would require acceptance of the programme and a commitment to activity; the political level required from young workers would be lower than that demanded from students.
5. The organisation must have its own press, must be able to polemicise with other political organisations and must have an active political centre.